A group of Cuban specialists has found unprecedented personal annotations on a wall by the U.S. writer Ernest Hemingway

This amazing announcement was made in the context of an International Colloquium on the Literature Nobel Prize, which brings together more than twenty academicians, researchers, lovers and scholars of the work of the writer, from Europe, Asia and America, including the United States .

The finding consists of notes on Hemingway´s corporal weight, found under four levels of painting in the bathroom of the novelist, said Elisa Serrano, specialist from the Centro Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museología (National Conservation, Restoration and Museology Center) (CENCREM) from Cuba.

“It is mainly notes on Hemingway´s corporal weight that dated from 1942 to 1953, evidence of his passion for sports, healthcare and his love for statistics,” said the researcher.

For the specialist from CENCREM , “these writings constitute a testimony of the presence of the famous writer in Cuba , found in his most intimate space.”

“This has been a complicated work of micro-intervention, with the use of magnifying glasses because of the difficulty of the rescue and preservation of the studied object,” she added.

The restoration specialist qualified as “the most important aspect” in this process “his humanist presence,” since she said “you need to travel back in time in order to talk with the correct work and make an intervention in it in an appropriate manner without violating its spiritual value.”

Serrano said that the original color of the front of the house of the country state was another discovery which was recovered and restored with the help of bibliographic material and physical work. This was done in such a way that the result offers the architectonic image to Hemingway´s taste, as he saw it for the last time.

U.S. experts have visited the island in 2006 and 2007 to exchange opinions on the restoration of Finca Vigía, but the project and its cost (1.2 million dollars) are undertaken by Cuba, since Washington forbids its institutions to contribute with funds due to the embargo it has maintained against the island for the past 45 years.

The country state is a colonial house where the author of Adiós a las armas lived, in San Francisco de Paula, a fishermen town 25 kilometers away from Havana . Cuba accuses the United States of forbidding the collaboration of cultural institutions and U.S. specialists in order to help preserve documents and restore the Finca Vigía Museum .

Nonetheless, in November 2002, there was an agreement signed between the Social Science Research Council from the United States and the Consejo del Patrimonio Cultural (Council of Cultural heritage) from Cuba for the recovery, preservation and digitalization of thousands of books, letters, magazines and leaflets from Hemingway.

Cuba will hand in copies of the 22 000 pages of around 3 000 documents belonging to Hemingway that it treasures to the John F. Kennedy library from the Congress of Washington, according to the agreement.

Hemingway lived in Cuba between 1939 and 1960, first in the Ambos Mundos Hotel, where he wrote For whom the bells toll and he then established his home in Finca Vigía, where he wrote his most important work: The Old man and the Sea, after which he received in 1954 the Literature Nobel Prize.